Quite how damaging all this turns out to be obviously depends on how long the state of alarm persists. In the UK and the US, we thankfully have a relatively high bar for imposing fresh restrictions, but that’s not the case in much of the rest of the world, including most European Union nations.

But even in Europe, a comprehensive lockdown of the sort we saw last year and early this is going to be very hard to sustain. The public won’t stand for it.

As for stock markets, we need to know more about the variant before we can make judgments. To me, however, there seem to be rather bigger things to worry about than the emergence of a new strain of Covid-19.

Whether of more than passing significance or not, what last Friday’s mini-panic did demonstrate is quite how vulnerable to any negative news already stretched equity valuations have become.

Leaving aside the pandemic, there are two major threats going forward – inflation and geopolitical risk.

The risk with inflation is that central banks have underestimated the threat, and will therefore soon be unable to hold the line on ultra-low interest rates. For already heavily indebted western economies, materially higher interest rates are going to do a lot of damage.